Saturday, April 24, 2010

Two Breakfast Vignettes

1. A few weeks ago I bought, on impulse, some cereal at the grocery store. I know...I totally caved in to some kind of lightly sweetened, organic corn squares cereal just cuz it was sitting there looking yummy and I was feeling crummy as I walked by it. Well here's how those chickens came home to roost. I don't drink milk, cuz it doesn't agree with me, and Righteous Juice (a fresh squeezed juice company in Athens) wasn't selling almond milk. Soooo, back I went to the dumb grocery store and bought some organic soy milk so that I could eat my cereal. Next day, I cracked open a bag of frozen blueberries, loaded up a bowl with cereal and poured on some soy milk, thinking yum, what an indulgence! Turns out the soy milk was spoiled and ruined my whole breakfast right in front of my eyes. I dumped out the soy milk and the cereal and got out some of my homemade yogurt and ate it with my backyard blueberries like I shoulda/woulda/coulda done before I got seduced by Kashi (which is owned by Kellogg, by the way). Sigh. Sometimes even a die-hard locavore has to learn the hard way again that the illusion of quality and goodness in our food system is a lie.

2. This morning while cracking a couple local, free-range chicken eggs into a pan for a feta spinach scramble, I discovered an earring nestled underneath an egg. I love finding evidence of a human being on the other end of my food. A real person fed these chickens and picked, washed and packed these eggs for me. (My name is on the carton). The only evidence of humans that you'll find in a carton of conventional eggs is evidence of human greed, cuz it's likely to come in the form of salmonella poisoning due to the inhumane and unsanitary conditions conventional chickens must endure to produce eggs for us.